Adèle

by Leïla Slimani

  In that pretty house, in the shade of the lime tree, she would no longer be able to escape. Day after day, she would bump into herself. While shopping for food, doing laundry, helping Lucien with his homework, she would have to find a reason to live. Something beyond the prosaic realities which, even as a child, suffocated her, made her think of family life as a dreadful punishment. How she wanted to vomit up those endless days of being together, cherishing one another, watching the little ones sleep, arguing at bathtime, looking for things to do. Men rescued her from her childhood. They dragged her from the mud of adolescence and she traded childish passivity for the lasciviousness of a geisha.

  “If you drove a car, you could have picked up your husband yourself. You’d be more independent, at least, don’t you think?” Lauren is annoyed. In the car Adèle tells her about her night. She doesn’t tell her everything. She hesitates, then finally admits that she needs to borrow some money. “I knew that Richard kept money in the house. But I wasn’t supposed to spend it, you see? I’ll get it back to you very soon, I promise.” Lauren sighs and nervously taps the steering wheel. “All right, all right, I’ll give it to you.”

  Richard is waiting for them in his room, with his bag in his lap. He is impatient. Lauren takes care of the administrative details while Adèle follows her, silent and tired, through the hospital corridors. She holds the ticket with their number on it while they wait in the admissions office. When their number is called, she says: “That’s us.” But it’s Lauren who actually speaks to the blond woman behind the desk.

  As soon as they enter the apartment, Adèle shrinks into herself. She could have put a vase of flowers on the little writing desk. She could have loaded the dishwasher. Bought some wine or beer. A bar of that chocolate that Richard loves. She could have hung up the coats that are sprawled over the chairs in the living room, washed the bathroom sink. Shown that she cares. Prepared a surprise. Been ready.

  “All right, I’ll get us something for lunch,” Lauren says.

  “I didn’t have time to go shopping,” Adèle explains. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t very organized. I’ll go and buy some food while you take a nap. Anything you want. Just tell me, okay?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry anyway.”

  Adèle helps Richard on to the sofa. She gently lifts the leg inside the plaster cast then puts it down on top of a cushion. She arranges the crutches on the floor.

  Days pass and Richard does not move.

  Life goes on. Lucien returns. Adèle goes back to work. She wishes she could lose herself in work, but she feels sidelined. Cyril greets her coldly. “You know Ben Ali was deposed while you were playing doctors and nurses? I left you messages, I don’t know if you got them, but in the end we sent Bertrand.”

  She feels even more distanced from her colleagues by the atmosphere of sentimentality that pervades the office. For days on end, they seem to do nothing but watch images from Tunisia on the television screen in the middle of the office. A crowd of young people on Avenue Bourguiba noisily celebrating victory. Women weeping in the arms of soldiers.

  Adèle looks at the screen. She recognizes everything. The avenue where she has walked so many times. The entrance of the Carlton Hotel, where she smoked cigarettes on the top-floor balcony. The tram, the taxis, the cafés where she would pick up men who smelled of tobacco and milky coffee. Back then all she could do as a journalist was listen to the melancholy of a people, take the lifeless pulse of Ben Ali’s country. Her articles were always sad, dull, resigned.

  Dumbstruck, her colleagues stand there, hands over mouths. They hold their breath. Now the images show Tahrir Square in flames. A chanting crowd. Effigies burning. Poems spoken into microphones. Talk of revolution. On February 11, at 5:03 p.m., Vice President Suleiman announces the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. The journalists yell and leap into one another’s arms. Laurent turns to Adèle. He’s in tears.

  “Amazing, isn’t it? And to think you could have been there. God, you were so unlucky—your husband having that accident.”

  Adèle shrugs. She gets up and puts on her coat.

  “Aren’t you staying? We’re all going to follow it here live. Something like this only happens once in a career!”

  “No, I’m going. I have to get home.”

  Richard needs her. He called three times this afternoon. “Don’t forget my medicine.” “Will you remember to buy trash bags?” “When are you getting home?” He is waiting for her. He can’t do anything without her.

  * * *

  *

  In the morning Adèle undresses him. She slides his boxer shorts down over the plaster cast while he stares up at the ceiling, muttering a prayer or an insult, depending on how he feels. She covers the cast with a trash bag that smells of paraffin, tapes it to his thigh, and helps Richard into the shower. He sits on a plastic chair and she lifts his leg on to the stool that she bought for him at Monoprix. After ten minutes he shouts, “I’m done!” and she hands him a towel. She accompanies him to the bed, where he lies down, out of breath. She tears off the tape, removes the plastic bag, and helps him to put on clean boxer shorts, trousers, socks. Before heading off to work she leaves a bottle of water on the coffee table, along with some bread, a handful of painkillers, and the telephone.

  During the week she is so tired that she sometimes falls asleep at ten o’clock, fully dressed. She pretends not to see the cardboard boxes piling up in the entrance hall. She acts as if nothing is about to happen. As if she can’t hear her husband asking her: “Have you talked to Cyril yet? Don’t forget you have to hand in your notice.”

  On weekends the three of them are alone in the apartment. Adèle suggests they invite some friends over to take their minds off things. Richard has no desire to socialize with anyone. “I don’t want them to see me in this state.” Richard is irascible, aggressive. Normally so composed, he frequently works himself into a rage. She thinks that perhaps the accident shook him up more than she realized.

  One Sunday she takes Lucien to the park on the hill of Montmartre. They sit on the edge of a frozen sandpit. Their hands are cold. Lucien has fun smashing the sandcastles conscientiously constructed by a blond child. The child’s mother, cell phone stuck to her ear, walks over to Lucien and, without ending her phone conversation, pushes him backward. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you little brat? Leave my son alone. And don’t touch his toys.”

  Lucien runs into his mother’s arms, staring at the little blond kid who is crying, his nose smeared with snot.

  “Come on, Lucien. Let’s go home.”

  Adèle gets to her feet and picks up her son, who starts crying and refuses to leave. She walks along the sandpit and, with her boot heel, crushes the blond boy’s sandcastle, then kicks his plastic buckets to the other end of the park. She does not turn around when the mother yells hysterically: “Hey, you!”

  “Let’s go home, Lucien. It’s too cold.”

  When she opens the door, the apartment is silent. Richard has fallen asleep on the living-room sofa and Adèle slowly undresses her son, a finger to her lips. She puts him to bed and leaves a note on the coffee table. “Gone shopping.”

  * * *

  *

  Boulevard de Clichy. Outside the window of a sex shop an old man in a dirty raincoat points to a red vinyl maid’s outfit. The black saleswoman with enormous breasts nods and invites him inside. Adèle passes tourists laughing outside erotic displays. She observes an old German couple who are choosing a DVD.

  Outside a peep show a fat blond woman parades in the rain.

  “A little dance. You won’t be disappointed!”

  “But you can see perfectly well that I’m taking my son for a walk,” responds a man in his thirties, outraged.

  “No problem. You can leave the stroller outside. I’ll look after it for you.”

  On the median strip shady-looking men drink big cans of beer or ch
eap bottles of vodka while they wait to be given a job to do. She can hear voices speaking Arabic, Serbian, Wolof, Chinese. Couples take their children for walks amid groups of drunks and smile when they see police patrols on bicycles.

  Adèle enters the long corridor with the pink velvet carpet, its walls covered with photographs of women’s bodies entwined, tongues out, buttocks spread. She greets the security guard. He knows her. He’s sold her cannabis on several occasions and she gave him Richard’s number when his sister was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Since then he’s let her in without paying. He knows that all she ever does is watch anyway.

  On Saturday evenings the place is sometimes sold out with boys here to lose their virginity or drunk office workers celebrating a new account. This afternoon there are only three clients sitting in front of the seedy little stage. A very thin middle-aged black man. A guy in his fifties, probably from out of town, who keeps checking his watch to make sure he’s not going to miss his train. And, at the back of the room, an Arab who gives Adèle a disgusted look as she enters.

  Adèle goes up to the black man. She leans over him. He turns to look at her, the whites of his eyes yellow and glassy, and smiles shyly. His teeth are rotten. She remains standing, her eyes riveted to his calloused hands, his open fly, his moistened, veiny hard-on.

  She hears the man behind her grumble and sigh.

  “Hchouma.”

  “What did you say?”

  The old Arab does not lift his head. He continues to stare sideways at the woman on the stage, who licks her fingers and then moans as she puts them on her tits.

  “Hchouma.”

  “I can hear you, you know. I understand what you’re saying.”

  He does not react.

  The black man grabs Adèle by the arm and tries to calm her down.

  “Let me go!”

  The old Arab stands up. Malice in his eyes. His jowls darkened by a three-day beard. He stares at her for a long time. Observes her expensive shoes, her man’s jacket, her clear skin. Her wedding ring.

  He spits on the ground and leaves.

  * * *

  *

  Out in the street Adèle is in a daze. Shaking with rage. Night has already fallen. She stuffs earbuds into her ears. She goes into a supermarket, wanders from aisle to aisle, carrying her empty basket. Even the idea of eating disgusts her. She picks up food at random, waits in line. She does not remove her earbuds. When it’s her time to pay she turns the volume up. She looks at the young cashier, fingerless gloves on her hands, the varnish on her nails peeling. If the cashier talks to her, Adèle is going to cry. But the woman says nothing. She is used to clients who don’t greet her.

  The mechanism has jammed. A terrible anxiety nests within her. She is dreadfully thin, the skin literally stretched over her bones. In her eyes the streets seem haunted by an army of lovers. She keeps getting lost. She forgets to look both ways before crossing the road and is startled by the sound of car horns. One morning she thought she saw an ex-lover as she was coming out of her apartment. Her heart stopped and she took Lucien in her arms to hide her face. She started walking fast, in the wrong direction. She kept turning around, certain that she was being followed.

  At home she fears the sound of the doorbell, listens out for footsteps in the stairwell. She checks the post. It took her a week to cancel the contract for the white phone, which she never found. She struggles to resign herself to it. She is surprised by sentimental feelings. Already she imagines them blackmailing her, spreading her secrets, going into the most sordid details. Slow and cumbersome, Richard is an easy beast to hunt. They will find him, they will tell him. Every time she leaves the apartment her stomach is in knots. She retraces her footsteps, fearful that she’s forgotten something, that she’s left behind compromising evidence.

  “Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

  She has put her husband and her son in pajamas. She’s fed them. She rushes outside, feeling that she’s done her duty and needing to be taken. She doesn’t know why Xavier is so determined to eat at a restaurant. She would rather have gone to Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, stripped down as soon as she got through the door, exhausted herself. Not spoken a word.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Thai or Russian?”

  “Russian,” replies Adèle. “We can drink vodka.”

  Xavier has not made a reservation but he knows the owner of this restaurant in the eighth arrondissement, a lair of businessmen and prostitutes, film stars and chic journalists. They are seated at a small table next to the window and Xavier orders a bottle of vodka. This is the first time they have eaten dinner together. Adèle has always avoided eating in front of him. With him.

  She doesn’t look at the menu. She lets him choose for her. “I trust you.” She barely touches her crayfish salad, preferring to freeze her fingers on the block of ice around the vodka bottle. Her throat burns and the alcohol sloshes around her empty stomach.

  “Allow me to serve you, madame.”

  The waiter, contrite, comes over to their table.

  “You may as well sit down with us, then.”

  Adèle laughs and Xavier looks away. She is embarrassing him.

  They do not have much to say to each other. Adèle bites the insides of her cheeks and tries to find a topic of conversation. For the first time, Xavier talks about Sophie. He pronounces her name and his children’s names. He says he feels ashamed, that he doesn’t know where all this is leading. That he is finding it harder and harder to keep lying. Finding excuses is exhausting, he says.

  “Why are you talking about her?”

  “Would you rather I thought about her and didn’t say anything?”

  Xavier disgusts her. He bores her. This affair is already dead. It is now nothing more than a frayed scrap of paper on which they continue drawing like children. It’s worn out.

  * * *

  *

  She is wearing skintight gray jeans and a pair of high heels that she has never worn before. Her blouse is too low-cut. She is vulgar. When they leave the restaurant, Adèle finds it difficult to walk. Her legs bend like a newborn giraffe’s. Her soles are slippery and the vodka is making her heels sway. Even though she is clinging tight to Xavier’s arm, she stumbles over a curb and falls to the ground. A passerby rushes over to help her up. Xavier waves the man away. He can deal with this.

  She is in pain and vaguely ashamed but she laughs, like a fountain spurting jets of icy water. She leads Xavier into the lobby of an apartment building. She doesn’t hear him when he says: “No, stop it, you’re crazy.” She pushes herself against him, covers his face with wet, desperate kisses. She puts a hand on his crotch and he tries to push it away. He tries to stop her pulling his trousers down but she is already on her knees and, eyes wild, he is caught halfway between pleasure and the fear that someone might enter the lobby. She stands up, leans against the wall, and wriggles her too-tight jeans down her thighs. He penetrates her, sliding inside her liquid, generous body. She looks up at him with moist eyes and, miming modesty, aping emotion, she says: “I love you. I love you, you know.” She holds his face and, under her fingertips, she can feel him surrender. She is stronger than his scruples. Like a rat numbed by the sound of her flute, he will follow her to the end of the world.

  “We could make another life together,” she whispers. “Take me with you.”

  He puts his clothes back on. Eyes like velvet, cheeks cool.

  “See you on Friday, my love.”

  On Friday she will tell him that it’s all over. With him, with everyone. She will find some dramatic excuse, something bigger than either of them. She will say that she is pregnant, that she is dying, that Richard has found out.

  She will tell him that she is starting a new life.

  “Hello, Richard.”

  “Sophie? Hello.”

  Xavier’s wife s
tands in the doorway. She is elegantly dressed and made-up. Her fingers cling nervously to the strap of her handbag.

  “I should have called first but I would have had to explain why I needed to see you, and I didn’t want to do that to you by telephone. I can come back later if you want, I . . .”

  “No, no, come in, sit down.”

  Sophie enters the apartment. She helps Richard with his plaster cast. She leans the crutches against the wall and sits facing him, in the blue chair.

  “It’s about Xavier.”

  “Yes?”

  “And Adèle.”

  “Adèle.”

  “Last night we had friends over for dinner. They were late and I wanted to check my messages, to see if there was a problem.” She swallows her saliva. “I have the same type of phone as Xavier. He’d left his on the table, in the entrance hall, and I picked it up. It was a mistake, I promise, I didn’t mean to do it. I could never have . . . Anyway, I read it. A message from a woman. Very graphic. At the time I didn’t say anything. Our guests arrived, we ate dinner. We had a nice evening, in fact, I don’t think anyone suspected a thing. When they left I confronted Xavier. He spent ten minutes denying it. He claimed it was a patient who was harassing him, some madwoman, he said he didn’t even know her name. And then he confessed everything. I think he was relieved. After a while I couldn’t get him to stop. He says that he can’t help himself, that it’s beyond his control. He says he’s in love with her.”